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The Call of the Wildhttps://poetsinews.com/2018/09/12/the-call-of-the-wild/
https://poetsinews.com/2018/09/12/the-call-of-the-wild/#commentsWed, 12 Sep 2018 17:06:50 +0000http://poetsinews.com/?p=635Continue reading →]]>I take a moment to celebrate my 80th blog post by veering away from the fine and performance arts to share a few thoughts about fiber arts, in which I am also heavily involved. I have been knitting for about as long as I have been reading, and I take great joy in the ongoing learning that is required for excellence in any true craft. The past few years have seen new forays into natural dyeing, weaving and spinning, and the achievement of a long-time dream of opening an Etsy shop to sell my wares.

Enjoying knitting and understanding its full process, from animal to garment, are not quite the same things. In the past two decades knitting has exploded in popularity, filling the internet with podcasts and indie dyers; there are retreats, conventions and fiber festivals everywhere. At the same time, the craft has also moved farther and farther away from the slow process of transforming animal and plant-based fibers into warm items that allow us to live in comfort, towards something more highly processed and commodified. Like everyone, I love visiting yarn stores and attending fiber events, wallowing in the now glorious choices of yarns and colors from all over the world. I remember well when our only choices were worsted weight Germantown wool or acrylic Red Heart; how wonderful that now we can find alpaca and cashmere and lambswool and qiviut and buffalo and silk and ramie and linen and cotton and soy and corn and hemp and many other fibers, in every color of the rainbow. With this extraordinary plenty has also come industrial application meant to make these fibers “easy care,” and it is hard now to find wool yarn, especially sock yarn, that has not been treated with the superwash process. At least in North America, this yarn is ubiquitous, and I am alarmed that all the talented independent hand dyers and small yarn makers are using this yarn base almost exclusively. There are very few yarn companies now who are making lines of non-superwash (that is, normal) sock wool, and they are mainly in Europe. Some have developed a superwash process that purports to be more eco-friendly.

What is the problem with superwash wool? Anna of the Dünkelgrun podcast, a knitter and chemist living in Switzerland, has outlined it very clearly in one of her podcasts. (You can find links to her podcasts and other fiber science information at https://dunkelgrun.com/). The process uses chlorine and a great deal of water, leaching toxic chemicals into the environment. Sometimes polymers are also applied to the yarn – I can attest to this, having tried the burn test on some superwash yarns. Light a piece of wool with a match; it should smell like burning hair, but if some of it melts like acrylic, then there is plastic in there somewhere. All of this processing is to strip the wool fibers of their natural scales, which causes wool to felt and shrink – in other words, to make it behave not like wool, and allow people to throw their knitted items into the washing machine.

When did we get so lazy or so busy that we cannot hand wash a sweater? Actually, with proper care, woolen socks and some garments, not superwash, can be washed in front loading machines on the wool cycle, and air dried. I have done this myself with my hand knit socks, and over a period of twenty years none have ever shrunk or felted. To be sure, some sock yarn contains a small amount of nylon to strengthen it, but even this is being tested now for better environmental choices, such as adding silk, alpaca or ramie to the sock wool instead. To my view, the superwash process is just not necessary. Some other knitters, spinners and podcasters have been voicing concerns about these issues, and championing natural alternatives. I salute Melissa of Knitting the Stash (https://knittingthestash.wordpress.com/), Am of Oysters and Purls (https://www.oystersandpurls.com/) and Sarah of Fiber Trek (http://fiber-trek.squarespace.com/) for their work in helping us remember where the wool comes from, and that sustainability is vital.

Some time ago I knitted an alpaca, wool and silk scarf for an outdoorsy friend. The second that scarf came into her household her dog Molly, a labrador and retriever mix, had it in her mouth. To this day, years and many washes later, my friend cannot leave the scarf unattended because Molly’s interest is intense. To us it is a warm and pretty knitted scarf; to Molly it smells of the alpaca it came from….her sense of smell perceives, as we cannot, how very close that fiber is to its animal source.

To be sure, I am an urban knitter and stand on no strong platform that we should all be out there shearing sheep and skirting fleece. For one thing I am allergic to nearly every animal on the planet; I feel quite lucky that I can knit without sneezing. But it behooves we who make to nurture respect for, and a connection to, the slow process of animal-to-garment. Part of the delight and value of hand crafting is that we carry on techniques that have evolved in our species over thousands of years, have allowed us to survive and flourish, and have created comfort and beauty in our world. Industrial practices such as the superwash process create more problems than they solve, and stand firmly between us and those traditional crafts, the generous animals who share their bounty with us and the planet we share. I appeal to the indie dyers, spinners and yarn makers out there to help us move away from this practice of chemical intervention; let’s find other bases and solutions to carry on our wonderful craft, and create harmony without harm.

]]>https://poetsinews.com/2018/09/12/the-call-of-the-wild/feed/5mpoetsosinewsIMG_4538Three Tall Women and Two Short Oneshttps://poetsinews.com/2018/07/10/three-tall-women-and-two-short-ones/
https://poetsinews.com/2018/07/10/three-tall-women-and-two-short-ones/#respondTue, 10 Jul 2018 14:27:16 +0000http://poetsinews.com/?p=630Continue reading →]]>I recently attended the wonderful revival of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women, with Glenda Jackson, Laurie Metcalf and Alison Pill, which just finished its Broadway run. Through sheer luck I have seen three versions of this terrific play with stellar actresses in the role of “A,” the most senior of the three women: the cold and elegant Marian Seldes in 1994, Maggie Smith, arch, hilarious and appalling, in 1995, and most recently the ferocious Glenda Jackson, at times moving and sad and mostly very, very scary.

It is well known that Mr. Albee wrote the play about his own mother, a socialite who, with her wealthy husband, adopted Mr. Albee as an infant. It was a corrosive relationship, and in various interviews over decades Mr. Albee described a frigid and uncaring environment in which much was expected but almost nothing, beyond material comfort, was given. As an incipient writer and openly gay man, Mr. Albee left as soon as he could, but the legacy of furor can be seen in the many unhappy women who populate his plays.

Having recently lost my own mother, I have thought much about this relationship and the extreme power that our parents, especially our mothers, have over us. It speaks volumes that Mr. Albee could write with such bravado and skill, and even some compassion, about the monstrous woman who had control of his early life and yet, as attested in interviews, still not find it at all cathartic. He wrote over and over again about death, dying, unhappiness, regret, inability or unwillingness to communicate, and a gulf between people, especially husbands and wives and parents and children, confronting the audience with terror and unpleasantness in a blaring wake-up call. He wrote, he drank, he was unpleasant to people and caustic to critics.

And yet. I know several people who knew Mr. Albee personally, and several more who worked with him on productions. All report a loyal friend and generous colleague. For more than 35 years he lived happily with his partner, until that man’s death. Despite Mr. Albee’s personal demons, he had a work ethic that allowed him to continue writing and producing through decades, listening to his own voice, ignoring public outcry and critical savaging. So the tall woman did not damage him to the point of paralysis. Perhaps the nannies and teachers along the way contributed to Mr. Albee’s own deep talent, and helped him to become the writer that we know.

My mother’s role in my life was equally looming, in both positive and negative ways. Much of what I deeply love in life, creativity, appreciation of beauty and the natural world, craft, came from her. Much of my anxiety and sense of insufficiency also came from her. She was a short woman, without much formal education, “poor but clean.” She married up, to a rising young executive, and was thereafter constantly thrust into situations for which she was unprepared. I remember her fuming anger at being cut by better dressed and better educated women, wives of my father’s colleagues, who pointedly noticed that she did not play bridge or wore last year’s colors. She taught herself unceasingly, traveling with my father and bravely blooming wherever she was planted. She always managed to have fun, but there was an underlying sense of rage in her, of not being quite good enough. Conflict between us arose almost always from her expectations of me, which were impossible to fulfill.

And yet. I loved her. I miss her every day. She was warm and she tried, and I feel sorrow that for a long time I did not understand her struggle. Despite the disharmony, when I knit or weave or spin or garden or sing, teach myself something new, appreciate a new place, I am celebrating her legacy. The short woman who was my mother continues to cast both sunlight and shadow, just as certainly as Mr. Albee’s tall woman did for him. The chiaroscuro of a mother’s power, love or lack of it, is a life companion to be reckoned with, exorcized, accepted, rejected or embraced, but it cannot be ignored. It surely makes us who we are.

]]>https://poetsinews.com/2018/07/10/three-tall-women-and-two-short-ones/feed/0mpoetsosinews3TWBetter Angelshttps://poetsinews.com/2018/05/24/better-angels/
https://poetsinews.com/2018/05/24/better-angels/#respondThu, 24 May 2018 18:50:14 +0000http://poetsinews.com/?p=627Continue reading →]]>I visited the revival of Tony Kushner’s huge and important Angels in America last month, currently running on Broadway, a strenuous 8-hour commitment requiring Wagnerian stamina. But unlike Wagner’s massive operas, Angels resonates into my personal history, for I was a participant in the 1980s AIDS epidemic, its political ramifications and its sequelae, evil and angelic.

I lived in San Francisco during the 1980s, an epicenter of this crisis. Very occupied with graduate school, at first I was only aware of local newspaper headlines. Then my landlord got sick. My neighbor got sick. Two guys I sang with got sick. I met a nurse who worked at San Francisco General, brave and overwhelmed with her work on the AIDS ward. I myself worked at UCSF Medical Center for a time, transcribing dictations for the Gastroenterology Department, hearing the epidemic discussed every day. A friend in the Gay Men’s Chorus told me they were no longer singing at memorials, because there were just too many. It was everywhere, all around us, but we – a city that prided itself on inclusion and caring – were doing something, trying, helping, dealing with this deluge of illness and fear as best we could. I decided to train as a “buddy,” to give my time if nothing else. Then I got a job in another state and had to leave before completing my training. In this new state I discovered an entirely different world, in which AIDS was akin to the a medieval plague or biblical leprosy, stigmatized, spurned and feared. There was nothing to help HIV sufferers. Nothing.

I telephoned a not-too-distant Gay and Lesbian hot line to ask how I could volunteer. I found out that there was no program, no clinic, no ward, no specialists, no social workers, no counselors, only a small ad hoc group of friends who were trying to help. I plunged in, was assigned a man who was ill, and started helping him with appointments, getting him information, visiting when he was hospitalized, bringing him chocolate and magazines, and listening, a lot of listening. I realized pretty quickly I was in way over my head. There was domestic abuse in his life (his partner, who was deeply enraged); he was not out to his deeply religious family, and he was afraid they were going to find out he was sick; he was missing a lot of work and scared he would be fired if his co-workers or boss found out; he lived in a small apartment building and was fearful of behind evicted – he did not want me or any health care workers to come to his home; his local GP advised him to find a specialist and asked him to continue his care elsewhere, the receptionist explaining that he would scare the other patients; and on and on. The amount of help this man needed, legal, psychological and social, spiritual and medical were nowhere to be seen and could not be met by me. He was utterly terrified, not only that he was going to die, but that he would do so homeless, abandoned and alone. His desperation was palpable and devastatingly sad.

In another year I moved again for my work, this time to New York where I volunteered for a while at God’s Love We Deliver, a genius organization. Slowly ways were being found to help AIDS sufferers, with varying and mixed results. Slowly the science evolved, and who could have imagined that within a couple of decades the disease would change to something manageable. That same year I joined the national march on Washington, walking with defiance past a White House that was morally absent, blind and uncaring.

Young gay men, needle users and others at risk for HIV today do not seem to understand the oppression and terror and loneliness of those terrible epidemic years. But Tony Kushner is here to remind us. Is it a perfect play? No. Mr. Kushner likes to philosophize and there is a good deal of intellectual wallowing. But he gets it, the lying and the ignorance and the love and the sorrow and the fear, it’s all there. And that scary, magnificent angel is still there, beating its wings and reminding us that disaster and salvation hover in middle air, and no one is exempt from compassion, from involvement or from being present in a human crisis, for no one knows who’s shoulder will next be touched. There is ignorance abroad in the land again, and Mr. Kushner’s ferocious angel is needed now more than ever.

]]>https://poetsinews.com/2018/05/24/better-angels/feed/0mpoetsosinewsLegacyhttps://poetsinews.com/2018/04/05/legacy/
https://poetsinews.com/2018/04/05/legacy/#respondThu, 05 Apr 2018 16:02:52 +0000http://poetsinews.com/?p=624Continue reading →]]>When Martin Luther King was assassinated, I was 13 years old. We lived in a white rural area far away from the South, but I knew about him. On TV and radio stations, at church and at home, I heard grown-ups talking. People did not like him. My father and others made comments about rabble rousers not knowing their place.

At that point I had known only two Negroes in my life, even though we lived less than 30 miles from a major Underground Railroad terminus. One was Lulu, the kind and comforting woman who helped take care of us when we were little, and the other was Penelope, who sat next to me in the sixth grade. Lulu I knew only as a large presence in our house when I was very small. She wore a white uniform and laughed a lot, she cooked things I liked to eat, and she could handle my tantrum-throwing brother, who was uncontrollable with everyone else. She ironed my father’s starched white shirts so perfectly, that I liked to stand on a stool and watch her do it. Lulu had grown children of her own, and I knew that she was raising some more that she adopted, but I don’t think I ever met them. They were in another world, far away. It didn’t occur to me then to ask her who was taking care of them while she was taking care of us.

Our rural elementary school was all white, but it went only to the fifth grade. After that I had to go “to town,” which is what we called the small village a few miles away, where a junior/senior high school was located. Thanks to Mrs. Metzger’s alphabetical seating system, I sat next to Penelope for a year. Hers was the only black face in our class, and she was taller than almost everyone – she had to tuck her long legs around her chair. She was quiet. When called upon to read aloud, her small voice hesitated over words. I could tell she didn’t like to stand up and read, and neither did I. I too was alone that year, coming from another school, and maybe that’s why Penelope and I ate our lunches together every day, laughing and being silly. One time she was gone from school for a long time, and I heard she had whooping cough, and then at the end of that year they moved away. I missed her. I called her my best friend, although I realize now I knew almost nothing about her. I cannot remember her last name.

Crystal clear in my memory, though, is the day of the assassination, when my father came home from work late. I asked him, “Are you glad he’s dead?” I will never forget the look on my father’s face, standing there still in his raincoat, a look that I now understand was shock and realization. “No,” he said. “I didn’t agree with him, but killing someone is wrong.”

I was confused. My father loved watching people shoot each other on television shows. He loved watching men jump on each other during football games, and yelled “Get him, get him!” at the TV screen. He owned guns and loved to hunt, never hesitating to kill even the most beautiful creature. I heard many times how disgusted and angry he was at the people fighting for civil rights. The message I received was that black people were somehow lesser than white ones, that they had a place defined by white people within which they must remain, and that if they strayed outside it they were subject to wrath and violence. No one overtly told me that, but at 13 years of age I had absorbed it, as my father’s stricken face suddenly understood.

I’m sure my father did not think of himself as a racist. He was the first in his family to receive a college education, and was a rising young executive with a strong Catholic upbringing. He had a degree in public health and cared about issues like poverty and hungry children. He thought of himself as generous, a nice man. And so, in many ways, he was. He was also a racist of the most insidious, unconscious sort, and what was passed on to him was passed on to us.

I can thank the extraordinary, brave souls in the civil rights movement for shining a fine light not only on overt injustices, but also the flecks of assumptions and judgements that lurk like viruses within my family and me. Decades later, even after fighting my own battles against misogyny and homophobia, I still question whether I can ever be fully free of the poison of racism. To be white in America means that we inherit it, deeply embedded in our mental DNA, hidden from view and still shaping everything, from policy to personal relationships, law, reproductive and gun rights, elections, immigration, world peace. Everything. It is important to acknowledge it – racism drives us still. And we must break the transmission or we will never be fair, or just, or free. As Stephen Sondheim so wisely put it: “Careful the things you say, children will listen.”

]]>https://poetsinews.com/2018/04/05/legacy/feed/0mpoetsosinewsstudents-pledge-allegianceGenius Taleshttps://poetsinews.com/2018/03/06/genius-tales/
https://poetsinews.com/2018/03/06/genius-tales/#respondTue, 06 Mar 2018 15:15:15 +0000http://poetsinews.com/?p=621Continue reading →]]>What is it about stories that demand retelling? We are human, we like stories. We tell them to each other, to our children, to ourselves, and reiterate our legends and warnings and promises. Some story lines recur and are recognizable across cultures and ages – star-crossed lovers, overreaching heros, those favored and punished by deities and fate – they remind us of life’s boundaries, these characters, and we know them. They recur in oral tales and literature, in music, in art; we recognize them and it is very satisfying.

Some of our stories are also history, about real people who did something wonderful, or terrible, who loved wrongly or endured greatly – we like these stories too. The horizons of human endeavor compel us to tell and retell, and wonder what it was that made those people so foolish, or so brave, so fearful, so brilliant. Joan of Arc – what young girl has not encountered this tale and wondered in her teenage self what made Joan courageous or mad, confident, reckless? Scott and Amundsen and Shackleton, the polar explorers, how can we understand what drove them into icy extremes towards death or glory? There is light and dark, scandalous love and notorious crime, outlandish behavior and sacrifice – we hear these stories over and over and gaze in wonder. Do we capture them, our predecessors? Perhaps not – perhaps there is always something unimaginable that keeps them just at a distance, and that’s why we return again and again, trying to understand.

One true story often retold is that of the Russian ballet impresario Diaghilev and his lover and star, the elusive Russian ballet dancer Nijinsky. Paris in the early 20th century was a time of artistic ferment: Picasso and Matisse were painting, Stravinsky and Debussy composing, Cocteau writing plays and libretti, Bakst and Chanel designing, among many others. Diaghilev was at the center of the wheel. A provincial Russian who re-invented himself as cultural maven, he was able to corral mountains of talent for his Ballets Russes company. He provided a platform for the work of Nijinsky, often referred to as the greatest ballet dancer of the 20th century. There is no film of him dancing, although a few spurious clips appeared on You Tube in recent years. They are now known to be recreations from still photographs by a French artist named Comte; we can never see for ourselves the reported miracle of his dancing. Add to that the then-illicit relationship, Diaghilev powerful and infatuated, Nijinsky gifted and unstable – in the end mentally ill and institutionalized – their story is ripe for retelling…what drew them together? Did they truly love, or only use each other, or both? How great, really, was their art?

The answer has been sought in many media over many decades. There are dozens of ballets, plays, paintings, poems, sculptures, musical compositions and films attempting to capture these fascinating men and their lives. Some very great talents have been involved, but they do not satisfy – the enigma remains. Most recently playwright Terrence McNally, an important voice for the gay community, ventured into this territory with Fire and Air, produced at the Classic Stage Company in New York. His play outlines the circumstances and relationship, and applies his typical warmth and humor, but in the end it fails to capture the miracle that made Nijinsky compelling and Diaghilev important. Casting is a problem, for who can really capture both the physical exactitude of one of the greatest of male ballet dancers, along with the chiaroscuro of his personality, or the gravitas and size of Diaghilev’s persona, his power of persuasion, his vision, along with childish eccentricities and weaknesses? We catch glimpses, but it is not enough, and we are left with an obsessive middle aged man and a petulant boy, still an intriguing puzzle.

A graduate school colleague of mine recently asked for a moratorium on this story, since every rendition – even when the inventors and participants are great artists – is found wanting. But that is the nature of a mystery, isn’t it – we look again and again and try to solve it, hoping always for a comprehension just out of reach. Did Shakespeare really write the magnificent plays that bear his name? How is it that Mozart left us extraordinarily beautiful music, yet died broken and unappreciated? What happened to Vincent, that his canvases still make us wonder and weep? We reach for a greatness that we cannot understand, hoping always to touch for a moment the nature of genius.

]]>https://poetsinews.com/2018/03/06/genius-tales/feed/0mpoetsosinewsnijinsky_vaslavA Christmas Lessonhttps://poetsinews.com/2017/12/19/a-christmas-lesson/
https://poetsinews.com/2017/12/19/a-christmas-lesson/#respondTue, 19 Dec 2017 16:30:27 +0000http://poetsinews.com/?p=618Continue reading →]]>In the U.K. they have a tradition of the “Nine Lessons and Carols” in church at Christmastime, where the lessons are readings from the New Testament, telling the biblical Christmas story. When I think of Christmas, though, my “lessons” are connected to my childhood and our family’s Christmas traditions. Now that both my parents have passed, their Christmas has faded, as distant to me now as a black and white movie of an era only heard about. My own practices have changed into something much more ecumenical, urban and modern, although I still cling to some of the old ways. I love to listen to the same Christmas music that played in our house when I was a girl, and to read Dickens and decorate a tree. I still like to make gifts and take care in wrapping them, but the month-long orgy of buying and wrapping and decorating and sending that dominated our household is no more. It is decades since I tried to bake the anise flavored cookies my mother always made, and our small holiday dinners bear little resemblance to the abundance of my parents’ table. I never throw huge Christmas parties as they did, and my city apartment cannot support the many wreaths and lights and candles that filled our rural home, inside and out.

It seemed a lot, but it all happened on a limited budget. We were encouraged to remember neighbors and relatives with small home-made gifts, hand delivered. We helped bake the cookies and decorate the tree with our construction paper chains, wrote our letters to Santa and put out the manger. Later on, if we brought home a stray kid or two from college, my mother made sure they too had a Christmas stocking filled with little gifts. Girlfriends, boyfriends and spouses came and went, all welcomed, all fed, all included.

My father was dedicated to his local Catholic church, and was one of the volunteers who put together and delivered a Christmas box to a local family in need. Where these names came from and who organized them, I do not know, but I do remember helping to put our boxes together. One or two cardboard cartons from the grocery store would sit on the kitchen counter. In would go the ingredients for a Christmas dinner, a frozen turkey, cans of pumpkin and corn, bread for stuffing, apples and potatoes, candy canes and chocolate Santas. Out of the closet would come a bag with small gifts, which we wrapped in paper and ribbon, socks and mittens and a doll, a truck, some crayons,….how did we know if there was a little girl, I asked, eyeing the doll. We know, said my father. Then, as both boxes seemed full and ready, my mother would say, wait, they need something for the table! Always the decorator, keen to share her skill with greens and ribbons and pine cones, she would take one of centerpieces she made and put it in on top, the final touch. Then we would climb the hill in the snow, for it was always snowy then, and put the boxes in the trunk of our enormous blue 1955 Buick. I always accompanied my father, while my mother stayed home with the little kids.

The year I was in the 4th grade, we left for our delivery and turned off the main road onto a long narrow dirt lane – I knew the place because we weren’t allowed to go there on our bikes. It got darker and lonelier the farther we went, several miles deep into trees and down into a hollow, near a swampy area at the end of a lake. There at the very end of the road stood a shack, surrounded by rusted cars and discarded pieces of unidentifiable metal, chairs, cans, junk. Is this the place, I asked? I was a little scared. Yes, said my father. We got out of the car and opened the trunk, and got our boxes – I carried the smaller one. We went to the door and knocked, and a lady with long greyish hair and sad eyes opened the door. Behind her were children, crowding around. She said thank you and took his box, and then one boy stepped forward to take the other box from me and suddenly I realized I knew him. It was a boy from my school, Ronnie Swineherd, who we called retarded because he was slow, a boy who always smelled bad and wore ratty clothes and had dirty fingernails. I could see he was shy and I was embarrassed. He took the box and they all said thank you and we left.

Ronnie Swineherd! As soon as we got in the car I started asking questions, why did they live there? Why was their house broken? Why were there old cars in the front? Why did Ronnie smell so bad? Up until that moment, at age 10, I thought we were poor. We did not have extra money for music lessons or fur boots or to have a horse. My grandma made my clothes, often derided by the neighbor girls who always had new things. I didn’t know that we were lucky in our stability. I didn’t know about fathers in prison and outdoor toilets and no running water. I didn’t know that children like me, children I knew were made to suffer because of the circumstances and mistakes of the adults in their lives. A few days later I received a Christmas card in the mail, lettered in pencil, with a thank you and my named misspelled, from Ronnie Swineherd. I felt bad. I was afraid he thought I wanted to be his girlfriend. I was afraid he would tell people. But I was also ashamed that I found out his secret, that I could take baths and he couldn’t, that I had toys, and food, and warmth, and that I laughed at him for smelling bad. Later that spring, when Mrs. Lang asked me to help Ronnie Swineherd with his fractions, I did, even though I still didn’t want to sit next to him. I understood then that he couldn’t help it.

A guy I knew in graduate school used to say, whenever we complained about being broke, “What if these are the seven fat years?” I smile about that now – I was luckier than I knew. That snowy Saturday delivering boxes with my father I learned about the immediacy of need and the blindness of plenty. I learned that even the smallest gesture can brighten misery, that awareness is lightened by understanding, and generosity can change a point of view and shape a world. Fifty years later, it has stayed with me, one of my Christmas lessons.

]]>https://poetsinews.com/2017/12/19/a-christmas-lesson/feed/0mpoetsosinewsExif_JPEG_PICTUREIt Tolls for Theehttps://poetsinews.com/2017/10/27/it-tolls-for-thee/
https://poetsinews.com/2017/10/27/it-tolls-for-thee/#respondFri, 27 Oct 2017 16:22:04 +0000http://poetsinews.com/?p=591Continue reading →]]>Bells have been around for as long as people have been on the planet. The actual bell as we know it is ancient, but even before that, it is probable that a startling sound, made from striking one object upon another, was used amongst humans as a means of communicating, warning, calling, memorializing. With the development of skills in making metal, four thousand years ago, this became the clanging sound we associate with bells.

Who does not have bells in their lives? Castles once used them to warn of approaching attack, churches to announce services and toll the dead. In Buddhist temples, bells serve a ritual purpose. Hindus ring the temple bells during puja. Schools use them – or used to, when I was a girl, to start and end each class, and each day. How we waited for that 3:15 bell! In the domestic sphere, a bell could summon a servant, or announce that a stranger was at the gate. With the arrival of the telephone, ringing no longer measured the day but interrupted it, rendering private lives accessible. Bells have now become electronic, and who has not had to wake in the morning to the annoyance of an alarm?

So deeply imbedded in human culture are bells and their use, that many volumes could be written about their presence in literature and popular culture. One thinks of Quasimodo, the bell ringer of Notre Dame; of Tinkerbell in Peter Pan; Lady Macbeth and her signal of murder. The striking of the clock pushes the narrative in A Christmas Carol; in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, we’re told that every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings. Bells tolling, bells warning, bells signaling, over and over, they recur across cultures and times. Two recent plays, both by African-American playwrights, use the ringing of bells to such powerful effect, as to captivate and in a moment summarize the entire premise of their plays.

In August Wilson’s Jitney, the setting is a down-at-heels car service in an African-American neighborhood in Pittsburgh in the 1970s. The stage directions are clear about the marginal nature of the place where the action occurs, with its bottles and signs and mismatched furniture, and most importantly, the pay telephone. The stage directions “The telephone rings” occur over and over again, for this is the sole communication system for Becker’s gypsy cab company. The more it rings, the more it signals the success of this business, the service and employment it provides. In performance, Mr. Wilson’s placement of the ringing is brilliant, punctuating and moving the action, creating and dissipating tensions. It is a real place with a real purpose and the ringing telephone constantly pulls us back into that, the function and the need of the place. At the play’s climactic last moment, Becker’s son, recently released from prison, stands in the office with a few of the drivers. They have just attended Becker’s funeral. The son Booster lacks the maturity and commitment that was embodied by his father. It is unclear what will happen to the threatened car service, losing its building and its owner. Then the pay phone rings. And rings. And rings. And Booster stands there, and it seems as though in a second we understand how much is at stake, not just for a single man or a single family, but for an entire community. The phone rings again. And again. When Booster strides to the phone and answers, “Car service,” it is an act of courage beyond measure.

In Fucking A, Suzan Lori-Parks’ ferocious interpretation of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, we find ourselves in a dystopian world of corrupt institutions, layers and layers of Draconian laws and rules, with utterly devastating consequences for those who do not follow them. Hester in this version of the story is an abortionist, and the “A” is carved into the flesh of her chest. Her role is a legal one, assigned by the state instead of a prison sentence, and Hester is busy. Her doorbell rings day and night, with someone “in trouble.” She performs her grisly task with weariness and inevitability. As the executioner in ancient times, the axeman, the hangman, so too is Hester needed and despised. She has one goal, to get her son out of prison, a son imprisoned as a child for stealing, now a man who she has not seen in decades. She saves her coins and tries and fails, tries and fails. Friendship and love come her way but they do not matter. Ms. Lori-Parks leads the audience and her characters through nightmare after nightmare, rape, murder, dismemberment; this poor woman is bludgeoned by first one event and then another. She loses all, and in the end what is left? Her tools, her bloodied apron, and the doorbell, ringing again. She responds in the end as Pavlov’s dog; despite all, events that would kill the strongest person, she puts on her apron and answers the door. In the end for her, there is only survival, and the bell.

The 17th century English poet John Donne’s lines “no man is an island” and “for whom the bell tolls” are frequently quoted, have been used as titles for other works, and seem likewise embedded in our consciousness. It seems a cliché, but these words, from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, deserve reviewing in context, rendered here in modern English:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

Mr. Wilson and Ms. Lori-Parks remind us of the price paid for our signal responses. Within chaos and loss, without guidance or comfort, these two characters stand in for all of us. We are mortal and will be diminished by death, by loss and oppression, but our common humanity requires of us recognition, and response.

]]>https://poetsinews.com/2017/10/27/it-tolls-for-thee/feed/0mpoetsosinewstolling-bell (2)The Content of Her Characterhttps://poetsinews.com/2017/09/21/the-content-of-her-character/
https://poetsinews.com/2017/09/21/the-content-of-her-character/#respondThu, 21 Sep 2017 16:10:11 +0000http://poetsinews.com/?p=577Continue reading →]]>From the moment we humans first developed speech, stories have been told about courage. It is seen as a manly virtue, essential for a warrior, a hunter, an adventurer, a king. The world’s primary cultural narratives celebrate this attribute and its manifestation, as legendary men are challenged with the most daunting of circumstances and manage, through their personal courage, to prevail and triumph. Courage as compulsive narrative has trickled down into our own time, softened by abundance and diluted by excessive information, and is attributed alike to regimes and their prisoners, victims of disaster, survivors of atrocities, politicians and sports heroes, cowardly lions and singing nuns. The word itself seems diminished.

And women’s courage? It is not so widely sung, even if acknowledged by the fact that without it, the human race would not be here. Women’s courage is often described in quieter forms, the ability simply to survive in the face of ceaseless oppression and mistreatment. We think of Penelope, endlessly unraveling her weaving as her husband roams the Mediterranean; she clings to dignity and avoids abduction by repeatedly creating and uncreating a shroud. With one hundred men carousing outside her chamber, what presence of mind, what brave patience was required to maintain this ruse? Cleverness is celebrated; think of the biblical Judith, determined to save her people, striding in her perfume and jewels into the camp of an invading conqueror, captivating and then beheading the man with his own sword, and striding out again with his head in a bag. Could the greatest of spies have conceived a better stratagem? To be sure, historical women with virile courage are often memorialized and then punished for stepping outside their spheres: think of Cleopatra, Boudica, Joan of Arc. The list of courageous women is long. The ones we don’t know about probably did the most.

I pay tribute here to a woman of courage who passed away this week, Edith Windsor. In another era we might not have known about her, for in many ways her life was ordinary, or as ordinary as possible for a woman who loved another woman in mid-20th century America. Ms. Windsor lived happily with her beloved partner for 46 years before she lost her to illness. At that point she could have retreated into her grief, but instead she chose to fight the unfair law that did not allow her to inherit the estate of her wife – for they had married in Canada – as other married couples do. Ms. Windsor made a quietly heroic choice, knowing she was sacrificing her privacy and allowing herself to become a target and a symbol, not for the benefits of the estate but for the fierce belief in a principal: fairness and equal treatment for all. Her law suit, United States v. Windsor, was argued before the Supreme Court in 2013 and ultimately brought about the repeal of DOMA, which nefariously stated that for legal purposes the word “spouse” applied only to heterosexuals. Ms. Windsor’s choice resulted in the fact that gay Americans at last have the same rights and privileges in marriage as everyone else, and if not for her lawsuit, we might still be waiting. Edie Windsor was in deed a woman of courage, for her actions turned the tide for LGBTQ people everywhere. She stepped into the light and carried the rest of us with her. Our debt to her is immeasurable.

]]>https://poetsinews.com/2017/09/21/the-content-of-her-character/feed/0mpoetsosinewsEDITHThe Woman Makes the Clotheshttps://poetsinews.com/2017/08/23/the-woman-makes-the-clothes/
https://poetsinews.com/2017/08/23/the-woman-makes-the-clothes/#respondWed, 23 Aug 2017 16:02:59 +0000http://poetsinews.com/?p=561Continue reading →]]>Nothing prepares you for the sheer energy of Rei Kawakubo’s designs. From the hands and imagination of this Japanese founder of Commes des Garçons have arisen works as muscular as those of Rodin, both drawing-room formal and motorcycle anarchic, evoking science fiction as well as history, geometry, nature, architecture, a lava flow of ideas, entirely original. In photographs the garments – one hesitates even to call them clothes – are often oddly shaped, consuming models and defying conventional movement and purpose. In person, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they have the effect of stopping you dead in your tracks and evoking visceral emotions, begging to be tousled and touched, commanding thought, summoning consternation and delight. Nothing is as it seems, and never is anything to be assumed. The whole concept of clothing, what it says and who it makes us, is called into question.

Famously, Ms. Kawakubo did not study pattern making or fashion design, but aesthetics and fine arts; the lack of formal training in the garment trade freed her to discard tradition and expectations, and simply make what was in her mind with whatever materials she pleased, and no thought to practicality or wearability, trends or criticism. A dress shaped like a gourd that hobbles the legs? Yes. A flutter of a wobbly disc that eliminates the shape of the body altogether? Yes. A dress that wears its own dress, or two? How about a hood that simply swallows and renders invisible its wearer, or a snake of cloth that winds and binds and captures? Yes. There are no “nos” to her designs.

Inherent in the work is anger, at the way fashion and clothing often distort female bodies, limit them, dictate their worth, define their purpose, sexualize, genderize, infantilize. Deconstructed corsets with lumps in odd places remind us of the stupidity of such a garment; a devastating mourning dress covered with the black tiny dresses of lost babies, swaths of black veils that completely subsume, call forth relentless motherhood and its cost. Gowns that bind with big gaping holes, mouth shaped apertures, great slashes of violent red, swirls and strips that terrify and overwhelm. These are clothes that drip with the rage of battle, at the price paid for position, role and life.

Her collection of wedding dresses is witty and profound. Seen from a distance, they are conventionally white and ecru dresses, of various shapes. Up close, you see the lovely Edwardian style gown is made with a fabric on which the lace is merely printed, a sham, and hanging from the large veiled hat, metal chains. A ball gown layered in many lace fabrics is sumptuous and beautiful, until one notices the black leather harness. These dresses are funny, and scary, and comment both on the absurd convention of weddings and on marriage as a sacrifice of freedom.

Ms. Kawakubo takes in the world as she designs. One series engages with colonialism, using many traditional fabrics, tartan, military dress, in shapes that evoke India, the far east, the tropics, binding together east and west, commander and slave. She plays with menswear, glen plaid, suiting, in ways that question and defy gender roles. Dimension and shape are paramount, and while her palette tends towards black, white and grey, she uses color to create disharmony, or to amuse or shock. The very concept of beauty is challenged; it is clear that she prefers the interesting and the damaged to the pretty.

“Clothes make the man”, a phrase that comes to us by way of Shakepeare and the ancient Greeks, expresses how deeply we connect personal image, true or false, to the way we dress ourselves. From Hans Andersen and old middle eastern folk tales we get “the Emperor has no clothes,” a way of saying that something appears to be true which is in fact a lie. Kawakubo understands that it is all lies. Her truth is achieved by turning clothing sideways, upside down, backwards, inside out and outside in, using both microscope and telescope to show us who we are, and who we might be. Her extraordinary artistry lies in challenging the circumscription of clothing, flaying the idea for the sake of a glimpse of the glorious, the ugly, the wonderful, inside.

]]>https://poetsinews.com/2017/08/23/the-woman-makes-the-clothes/feed/0mpoetsosinewsKawakuboThe Wave and the Mountainhttps://poetsinews.com/2017/08/04/the-wave-and-the-mountain/
https://poetsinews.com/2017/08/04/the-wave-and-the-mountain/#commentsFri, 04 Aug 2017 15:36:09 +0000http://poetsinews.com/?p=555Continue reading →]]>The framed photograph of my mother, happy and dressed for my brother’s wedding, sits on a Korean chest in my living room, where I can see it many times every day. Hanging above it on the wall is a fine print of Hokusai’s The Great Wave, given my father by one of his Japanese colleagues decades ago, and passed on to me by my mother after his passing. Now she too is gone, and the photograph and the print and the chest share a synergy of my parents, a couple who traveled and loved Japan, and especially my mother, whose artistry in bonsai was renowned and who, even on her worst days, strove to create beauty in her world.

How many thousands of times have I looked at The Great Wave? It is perhaps the best known work of Japanese art, and it is reproduced everywhere, place mats and posters and handkerchiefs, on the wall of many a sushi restaurant. We think we know it – it is a tsunami, or a giant wave about to crash. You have to look carefully to notice the fishing boats and desperate men, huddled down and hanging on. Knowing they are there changes the narrative, the wave is threatening and dangerous; lives are at stake.

But the wave is only a part of the story, because in the distant background, silent, strong, quiet, is Mt. Fuji, watching all. Mt. Fuji, the Buddha of mountains, sacred and revered in Japan. Its serenity and permanence provide a strong counterpoint to the chaos in the foreground. I overwhelm, says the wave. I am here, says the mountain. I terrify, says the wave. I am here, says the mountain. I murder, says the wave. I am here, says the mountain.

Grief itself is a wave, or many waves, oceanic in size and like Hokusai’s, powerful, crushing, vast. I often feel like those fishermen, wretched, just hanging on until the untrustworthy seas return to calm, dreading the next wave that I know will come. But the blessed mountain summons a love that has, somehow, survived my mother’s death. There is bedrock in the mother-child relationship that remains, solid, enduring, still there after each cataclysm. In Japan, Mt. Fuji is often termed Fuji-san out of respect. My brothers- and sisters-in-law all called my mother Mama-san, for the same reason. In my living room and in my mind, the mountain and my mother speak to each other and reach across the abyss to me, saying always, we go on. We are here.